Diane Arbus

Arbus revolutionized the art she practiced and her achievement continues to be a wholly original force in photography. Her bold subject matter and photographic approach produced a body of work that is often shocking in its purity, in its steadfast celebration of things as they are. Her gift for rendering strange those things we consider most familiar, and uncovering the familiar within the exotic, enlarges our understanding of ourselves. Even the earliest examples of her work — in spite of their stylistic similarities with other documentary photographers of the period — betray elements of Arbus's distinctive sensibility through the expression on a face, someone's posture, the character of the light, and the personal implications of objects in a room or landscape. These elements, animated by the singular relationship between the photographer and her subject, conspire to implicate the viewer with the force of a personal encounter.

Diane Arbus's insight into the world of subcultures, codes and rituals, utopias, and unlikely affinities informed the whole of her work. By the time she published her first two magazine projects, "The Vertical Journey" and "The Full Circle," in the early sixties, Arbus had established the style and character of her approach to her subject matter. Her 1963 Guggenheim Fellowship application, American Rites, Manners, and Customs, summarized her territory as a photographer — one that encompassed projects as varied as Winners, Pseudo Places, Female Impersonators, Marriage, and Children of the Very Rich. A year after her second Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966, 30 of her photographs were included, along with the work of two other photographers, in the controversial exhibition New Documents at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. A year after her death in 1971, the Museum of Modern Art hosted a posthumous retrospective, the first and only major museum exhibition of her work to date.

CATALOGUE Diane Arbus Revelations The book reproduces 200 full-page duotones of Diane Arbus photographs spanning her entire career, many of them never before seen. It also includes an essay by Sandra S. Phillips and a discussion of Arbus's printing techniques by Neil Selkirk. A 104-page illustrated chronology by Elisabeth Sussman and Doon Arbus is composed mainly of excerpts of the artist’s writings and amounts to a kind of autobiography. These texts help illuminate the meaning of Diane Arbus’s controversial and astonishing vision.

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Diane Arbus
Organisation: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art